Ted Wood - Murder on Ice aka The Killing Cold

"Then he got what he deserved," I said. "Come on." We negotiated the rest of the stairs and she spoke angrily through her tears, like a child who has been wrongly scolded.

"I'd never done it with anybody before. I was a virgin."

I patted her arm. "You still are. Nobody in the world knows your secret. He's dead and the bad news died with him."

It wasn't true, but it was the best thing to say even though just telling her made me feel dirty and unshaven and uncouth. I felt the old familiar disgust growing within me. I wanted this to be over. The other member of the Guard group could go to hell for all I cared. I wanted to be in the station with Val until sanity came flooding back with the morning daylight and we could turn over Tom's description to other people and go away and rediscover the fact that gentleness still exists in the world.

Outside, the snow was still whirling and Nancy gasped as the chill hit her face. Fortified with Black Velvet and adrenalin, I didn't even notice it. I picked up my snowshoes but did not put them on. Shoulder to shoulder with Nancy, I struggled through the drifted snow to my machine. I had one bare hand on the gun in my pocket, ready to shoot if anybody fired on us, but nobody did.

I started the machine and sat on it, wearily, instead of kneeling. Nancy sat behind me, hanging on tight enough to break my heart.

I took us slowly up the road to the station. It was hard to tell, with the snow that had fallen nonstop for the last six hours, but it seemed to me that there was a skidoo trail there, that the surface had been broken in the last hour or so. I wondered if somebody had talked his way out of the Legion and headed home on his skidoo. I hoped that was it. Tom was still out somewhere, a potential for trouble, and I didn't want any more. Outnumbered and outgunned I had found Nancy, and now I wanted to wait till morning before I did any more police work. I wouldn't be able to go home to bed, but I could doze at the station.

The wind had shifted and reshaped the snowdrift beside the back door of the police station, laying it longer and lower so that I was able to pull up close to the door that led to the cells. I felt uneasy. There were definite tracks here, more recent-looking than my own. I felt my heart bump a couple of times rhythmically. Maybe I was just tired. I'd been shot at three times, had someone try to frag me, and found a rape victim. My adrenalin was running like maple sap in February.

In the silence that followed my stopping the machine I heard Sam barking inside the station. That relieved me. Whatever else happened, Val was safe. Sam could bring down any man with any weapon he could hold. I tapped Nancy on the shoulder and she followed me over the last six feet to the door. Then I whistled once, a short clear note, and Sam stopped barking. The door was locked and nobody came to open it, but that made sense. I had told Val to stay inside and she was taking no chances. I fumbled for the key and opened up, stepping in first. It's not gallant but it's sense. It put me in the firing line, if any-that's what I was paid for. Nancy wasn't.

Then I stopped and looked around with my mouth hanging open in disbelief. Val was gone. Both my prisoners were locked in one cell. Sam was locked in the other.

I paused only a second, but in that time I could read what had happened in the expressions on the faces of the two women. The thin one from the Legion was smiling a thin, smug little smile. The other girl was close to tears. I knew then that Val was gone. I went through the obvious drills anyway, kicking open the door to the front of the station and jumping in, gun drawn, to search it. There was no one there. The teletype was clacking under its plastic cover, the gun rack still held two guns, the same empty Coke bottles stood under the counter where the public could not see. But Val was gone.

I put my gun away and came back to the cells. Nancy Carmichael had come in and was looking at the two women with a gaze that must have told them everything that had happened to her that night. They were silent. I let Sam out of the cell and fussed him and told him he was good, then I turned to the prisoners. "What happened?" The thin one said, "Find out, pig," but the other one said, "He came for her, Chief."

"Who is he?" I had a hundred questions, including how had he gotten into the station without being pinned to the floor by Sam, but for now I wanted some facts.

"The others called him 'Tom,'" the pretty girl said. I remembered she was Freddie.

"Did he say where he was taking her?" I could imagine what he would do to Valerie, was perhaps already doing. She had come to this place trusting me, trusting the whole system of Canadian law to keep her as safe as she would have been in Toronto, and now she was the hostage of a hoodlum. I knew this was no revolutionary group. Terrorists don't rape, it's a bourgeois crime. They maim and kill, but they don't rape. Bikers rape. This Revolutionary Guard talk was a smokescreen. These were personal crimes being carried out and I hadn't seen it until now, when it was too late.

"Where would he have taken her, Freddie?"

She opened her mouth to answer but the thin one cut in, her voice tingling with excitement. "Somewhere you won't find her." I reached through the bars and grabbed her by the arm, pulling her against the bars, not savagely but too close for comfort. "Stay out of this, you don't know what these people are like." Then I shook her arm away and repeated my question.

Freddie said, "I don't know, Chief. He didn't say." And the thin one added her own message. "He said you had one hour and then he was going to show her a good time."

The blood roared in my ears. I took Nancy by the shoulder and led her to the cell. "You'll have to wait, Nancy. I'll call your parents in a little while. First I have to attend to this new business." She went into the cell without speaking and I locked the door. Her face was deadly white. She sat on the wooden bunk, not looking at the others. I could understand her fear but I was more concerned about Valerie's safety.

Sam was keening as if he could explain how he had been outsmarted but I had no time to find out now. I patted his head and told him "Keep" and left him while I went into the front of the station and unlocked the shotgun from the rack. I knew it was loaded but I pumped the action one time to load the chamber and pushed another round into the magazine. Then I scooped a half-dozen extra shells out of the box and slipped them into my pocket. With that gun I was the equal of fifty men.

I took the time to top up the fuel in the snow machine. I didn't want to run dry a mile from my destination and waste even more time trekking up there in snowshoes. The snow was still falling, although it seemed that the wind was slackening. I was glad of that. I had some tracking to do.

The tracking was easier than I had expected. The skidoo had followed the road almost to the bridge in town, then turned east through the trees. I followed it, keeping my speed as high as I could, ducking under branches, showered with dumps of snow from those I could not miss completely. It occurred to me that they might be setting me up for an ambush. I shouldn't be barreling down a red-ball road like this. I would never have done it in Nam, but here I didn't care. I had heard enough about this Tom to believe he meant what he said. He would want to take his revenge on me by violating Valerie. The thin girl from the Legion had told him about our relationship, I could count on that. Now he would punish her for helping me, punish us both, punish the world. Unless I got there first.

A quarter-mile north of town the tracks swung back onto the lakeshore road that serviced all the cabins along the east shore, and I began to guess where he had gone-back to the cottage where I had left Elliot and the women. I patted the shotgun that lay under my knee on the saddle of the machine. I would need it now with four people against me.